Drills & Block Starts for Advanced Hurdlers Workout
by Steve McGill

Elite athletes, and even advanced athletes at the high school level, need to be constantly challenged to keep their skills sharp and to instill the ability to make constant adjustments to their own speed and power. While advanced athletes don’t need to do a lot of drilling like beginners do when it comes to developing excellent technique, drilling is still very useful in the off-season for such athletes as a way to provide a foundation for being able to make super-quick decisions while moving at hyper speeds. 

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This past weekend, professional 100m hurdler Evonne Britton came to train with me for two days. This was her third visit with me over the past two years, after she discovered my YouTube channel and grew interested in implementing my ideas into her own training. When it comes to drills for elite athletes, I prefer to use super-duper tight spacing and lower hurdles. The purpose has everything to do with cadence. We’re aiming to establish a cadence that is quicker than race cadence, so that race cadence will ultimately quicken as a result. Hurdling, being a rhythm event, has an auditory element to it. So, if you can hear your cadence, you can tell if you’re running fast or not. And you can seek to quicken the cadence in drills, trusting that you will be able to match the cadence in races because your speed will compensate for the increased spacing and increased hurdle height. 

In the off-season especially, quickness drills are very useful for elite athletes — because they put relatively little pounding on the legs, even when doing fairly heavy volume, and because such drilling generally doesn’t take a long time to recover from.

Day one with Evonne consisted of the following, but keep in mind that I was somewhat winging it because she hadn’t hurdled in over two months after suffering a hamstring injury:

• Super-tight quick-feet drilling over 24-inch hurdles, spaced 11 feet apart.
• Same as above, spaced 13 feet apart.
• Super-tight cycle drilling over 24-inch hurdles, with a 4-step approach to the first hurdle. Hurdles spaced 15 feet apart.
• Super-tight quick-step drilling over 24-inch hurdles with a 6-step approach to the first hurdle. Hurdles spaced 19 feet apart.

When working with elite hurdlers, the number of reps will be minimal because quality is always more important than quantity, and because there simply isn’t as much teaching to do. So with Evonne we did a rep or two over just one hurdle with each stage of progression. We built up to as many as seven hurdles for the quick-feet drilling. The number of reps at each stage never exceeded five. 

When working with advanced hurdlers who have minimal technical issues and are always challenged to negotiate the space between the hurdles, I find that working often over very low hurdles (24 inches for females, 30 inches for males) is a very effective way to work on rhythm and cadence. 

On day two with Evonne, we worked on starts, also over low hurdles. We started with 4-point block-free starts before putting down the starting blocks. We only did a total of maybe 6 reps over one and then two 24-inch hurdles, due to the fact that her legs and hips were sore from the day before, but all of the reps were quality reps. The purpose of the block starts was to reinforce the lessons learned from the drill session, and to try to duplicate, as close as possible, the cadence between hurdles one and two that we had between the hurdles in the drill session.

The video below consists of footage from day one and day two with Evonne. I wouldn’t suggest doing the drills and the block starts on the same day unless the volume of the drills is cut down significantly. 

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